On December 22, an image of the President of the United States of America (USA) Joe Biden, First Lady of The USA Jill Biden and President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy went viral in which President Biden was seen grabbing Zelenskyy’s posterior.
One President’s hand on another President’s buttocks was more than enough to cause a laughter riot on social media.
Hehehehe….Jesa sekhaya hai, wesa hi bolna…. pic.twitter.com/bCkmudtI22
— Dolli (@desh_bhkt) December 22, 2022
‘When Zelensky asked Biden that how he gonna return all favors’ pic.twitter.com/HMMXtQSOSN
— Facts (@BefittingFacts) December 22, 2022
There is one rule that must be followed. If something is extremely emotional or funny or provocative, in most cases, it is “too good to be true”. Following this principle, we decided to fact-check the authentication of the image.
During the investigation, we looked around for a similar image and found that Jill Biden uploaded the exact frame on December 21 (local time) with the caption saying, “President Zelenskyy, we hope you take our love and support back to Olena and your children, and all the families of Ukraine.” However, we noticed that President Biden’s hand was nowhere close to President Zelenskyy’s posterior.
President Zelenskyy, we hope you take our love and support back to Olena and your children, and all the families of Ukraine. 💕 pic.twitter.com/z1uqAAl8B8
— Jill Biden (@FLOTUS) December 22, 2022
In the next step, we downloaded both images and decided to investigate the matter properly. The first step was to resize the images in a way that we only had two frames with exact dimensions. At this point, it was clear that one of the images was edited.
Then we enlarged the image to the point where we could only see the trio standing in the frame.
Now, look at the images and see the points that we have marked. We created a GIF to make it easier to understand how things were edited in the image.
At Mark 1, you will notice that whoever edited this image cut President Biden’s arm from here and rotated it downwards towards President Zelenskyy’s posterior.
At Mark 2, you will notice that the crease on President Zelenskyy’s back has been wiped out during editing. President Biden’s arm was here in the original photograph.
At Mark 3, you will notice in the original image that Jill’s hand was on President Biden’s thumb. Whoever edited it could not remove the thumb, which is still under Jill’s hand.
At Mark 4, you will notice the crease of President Zelenskyy’s back was wiped out to cover the empty spot created by removing President Biden’s arm.
We also found a video of the arrival of President Zelenskyy. At the 0:40 timestamp in the video, Jill Biden placed her hand on the back of President Zelenskyy, then President Biden placed his hand on President Zelenskyy’s back. As you can notice, President Biden’s hand was not on Zelenskyy’s buttocks.
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden welcome Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (@ZelenskyyUa) to the White House on his first foreign trip since the Russian invasion. pic.twitter.com/OhKxek3oQM
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 21, 2022
Conclusion: The image of President Biden’s hand on President Zelenskyy’s buttocks is fake.
